The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  “Cat chipped a tooth.” He sighed. “Thus, the cat’s nine lives. I’ve gotta find a taller building. I might kill one of the little bastards here. They don’t have the time to spread out and increase drag and get the landing gear down properly.”

  “Are you crazy or is there some point to this?”

  “I’ve got a screenplay about a cat burglar. Almost a comic-book figure but not quite. He escapes by turning himself into a cat. Literally, figuratively speaking. Concept’s a little hazy, but it’s easy to catch on to, y’know. So who can say? We could have a hit, we could have a fart in a space suit. No way to tell. But you didn’t come here to listen to me rave on about cats—”

  “You could have fooled me,” I said.

  “Bechtol said something about your brother. Well, hell, I bought the rights to your book, we’ve got the screenplay in development. The writer’s a turd, but what can you do, he’s a writer. Bane of my fucking existence. So what’s Bechtol’s problem?”

  “You know. He thinks JC is alive. He seems to think you’re of the same mind. Why does he think that?”

  “What do you think?” He gave me a look so shifty it had to be a joke. “Is he alive?”

  “Look, I’m just glad we’re off cats.”

  “Listen, pal, I’ve got an interest in JC. Obviously. We’ve all got an interest in JC. If he’s alive, well, hell … I don’t want to have fifteen, twenty million in a picture that has the wrong ending. Not if I can help it. I don’t want to picture him dead as a lox and suddenly he’s on the front page of every paper in the world, making me look like a total asshole. Only makes sense, ’kay? Who knows what it could mean for the picture, plus or minus? Nobody, that’s who. But I’d like some warning if he’s gonna pop up on Entertainment Tonight. Maybe it would give the picture a real boost, maybe it would sink it for all time. I’m not saying I know. But I’d like to have the time to lay out a campaign for any eventuality … so, sure, I’ve got some inquiries out, some of my people looking around, trying to pick up a piece of information here and there. No crime in that. For instance, I’m going to Paris tomorrow, I’ve got a lead there, some A-rab camel driver or some goddamn thing, says he knew JC in Casablanca a couple of weeks before he died …”

  There was an explosion of honking from up above the house. Another visitor. Fernando Lamas’s son, perhaps.

  “Lamas,” he said, sensing my curiosity. “Been waiting three days.”

  “Camel driver,” I said. “Sounds weak to me.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. Thing is, this guy says your brother talked to him about some crazy escape route he’d laid out, told the A-rab it was foolproof. He says your brother wanted to hide away and spend the rest of his days writing poetry.”

  “Not exactly the brother I remember so well. Pornographic limericks, maybe.”

  “Well, wait a minute. He wrote a lot of lyrics, ’kay? Some are pretty bloody marvelous, ’kay? I don’t think the A-rab’s story is so farfetched. Listen to some of his stuff again—”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Anyway, this A-rab says JC was pretty sexed out in Casablanca. Says he was providing JC with some very young girls—”

  “So he was a pimp, not a camel driver. You and he have credibility problems, my friend.”

  “Very, very young girls and boys of all ages. Sort of burning his candle at both ends, as they say.”

  “What utter bullshit!”

  “Well, you’d naturally protect his reputation, wouldn’t you? He’s your brother—”

  “Look, I was there. Girls maybe, but JC was not into boys, young or old. If you’re paying this Arab anything, you’re dumber than your cats.”

  I looked up. Something funny was being led around the corner of the house. It had four legs and looked as if it had started out to be a horse and run into design difficulties. Another one followed the first.

  “I’m not impressed,” Stryker said. And he wasn’t even looking at the recent arrivals. “Not with your indignation and your outrage. What’s it to you, anyway? You’ve made your pile off your brother … Maybe you’re afraid he’ll come back and the record royalties will go to him—is that it?”

  “I believe my brother is dead. I want it to stay that way. I don’t want him, the memory of him, dragged through the slime just to hype your movie. He’s dead. I don’t want to look up at the screen and see him turned into some crazy Arab procurer’s idea of a sex-crazed rocker, not when he’s not here to defend himself. That isn’t why I sold you the rights to my book.”

  Stryker stood up. His back was still to the three—count ’em, three—creatures being led past the pool in our general direction.

  “Why did you sell the movie rights? ’Cause you wanted the money. Don’t kid yourself about that. Look, why not just keep your shirt on, Sunny Lee. We’re talking about show business here. Which is the money business. A money business which to a very large extent depends on the total, brainless crap the twelve-year-old mind clamors for. Leave us have no illusions. I’m in this for the money. MagnaFilms is sure as hell in it for the money. So don’t be a sanctimonious asshole while you’re still getting your cut, ’kay? There’s plenty for everybody. If you don’t like it, find him yourself … or prove he’s dead. Do you hear me saying that maybe you killed him yourself and then pulled that disappearing act in Switzerland? No, you do not. But there are people who believe that. They’re around, my friend. So don’t make an enemy out of somebody who’s got nothing against you, ’kay?”

  One of the creatures made a peculiar sound and Stryker’s face broke into a broad smile. He was fifty or so but his teeth were clearly about a year old. He spun around to face the animals and their two attendants.

  “My llamas! My llamas are here! You little fuckers, come to Poppa!”

  I hadn’t needed my autograph book after all.

  No one took much notice of my departures except for William Randolph Stryker, who was poking around in the shrubbery looking for a ball. I slowed the Caddy and he looked up, grinned. “Lost two just since you were here. It’s Ellen, no sense of direction.”

  I gave him an address and asked him how to get there from here. He said, “Hey, that’s Freddie Rosen’s place. Silver Lake. It’s a lot closer to downtown. Freddie’s a good man. I work for him sometimes. Y’know, little stuff. He gives me free CDs.” He told me how to get there.

  Seven

  I FINALLY GOT TO THE right part of town—I had no idea which town or city I was in, Los Angeles itself or one of the towns that hug a lower-middle-class neighborhood with kids playing catch and hanging out looking teenage-shifty. I asked directions again and began to climb through increasingly narrow streets of aging bungalows and cars parked at curbside rather than hidden in garages. The sidewalks were old and cracked but the palm trees swayed above and seemed to make everything else okay.

  I felt the stinging in my eyes. My face felt as if I’d stuck it into a bag of hot coffee grounds. Los Angeles was a mystery to me. Geographically, climatologically, and zoologically. Katz and Lamas. I was still thinking of how cute movie people could be when they got serious about it, then suddenly realized I could breathe without coughing. I’d fumbled out of the worst of the smog and was looking down on it again past the tops of palm trees and some towering oaks.

  Rosen’s house was hidden behind a wall and gate at the top of the hill in a cul-de-sac. Was it a hill or a mountain? How the hell should I know? I was a stranger there myself, as the man said.

  I parked the Caddy and walked across the shady street to the gate, which was a showstopper. It was about ten feet tall and solid wood, no peek-a-boo grille. And it was carved. All over, like something conceived and executed by the English genius Grinling Gibbons. It’s not often that the old chap comes to mind, but when he does there’s no alternative to him. Staring at that gate, what else could a fellow think? Grinling Gibbons. Of course Gibbons didn’t specialize in countless anthropomorphic mice, ducks, squirrels, kitties, bunnies, hound dogs, teddy bears, chipmunks
, beavers, knights in armor, maidens leaning from tower windows, dragons with great elongated tails and talons, serpents with flicking tongues twisting around tree trunks featuring owls on branches and more gnarls than you could count. It all resembled a Disney animator’s worst hangover. But there was a nutty magnificence to it as well; it might have been a metaphor for the whole place. That’s one of the problems about Los Angeles, Hollywood, whatever you want to call it. You’ve got to keep fighting the impulse to find metaphors everywhere. It’s all a result of the movies, which are themselves merely metaphors for reality … you see, there I go again. Anyway, it was late afternoon and the sun was casting long shadows. As the light lowered, the carved animals seemed almost alive. Maybe when night fell they left the gate and went to town.

  If they could find it …

  I pushed the gate and slowly it swung back on its massive hinges. The driveway curled around a small pond with a very large fountain in the middle, lily pads below. Mermaids sat on the edge of the fountain feeling the gentle spray of three cherubs peeing. There were no actual human beings in sight, peeing or otherwise, but I could hear a hellish din coming from inside the big house, which was, I supposed, vaguely hacienda-like. There were stucco or adobe and terra-cotta tiles and pots and big dark beams that appeared to be poking through the walls. A very classy-looking old Mercedes convertible sat up near the porch, the kind of car Reichsmarschall Göring would have liked. I stopped to look at the car and found someone in the backseat. The noise from the house was getting louder. It was—if you were willing to stretch a point or two—a rock band. “Hello, there,” I said, but the little boy on the black leather upholstery was engrossed in a picture book about dinosaurs. “That’s a stegosaurus,” I said.

  He looked up. He was three, maybe three and a half. “No way, José,” he said confidently, patient with adult idiocy. “Dimetrodon. They’re very different.” He pointed to the spine fin. “Very different,” he said again for the slower students.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?” He looked up, round-eyed. Maybe he was four. I’ve never had kids of my own. How should I know how old he was? But definitely not five. He was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball shirt, blue jeans with plaid cuffs, and red sneakers the size of my thumb.

  “That Baggie. What’s in it?” I prayed I was wrong.

  “Daddy’s coke, I guess.”

  “Ah.” The baggie was open and some of the white powder had sifted out onto the black leather. There was a smudge of it on one of his fingers. “Would you like me to take it to your daddy?”

  “No way, José. I’m guarding it.” He folded the top of the Baggie tight and moved it closer to his thigh with a proprietary gesture.

  “Right. I get it. Now that’s a brontosaurus, I’m sure about that.”

  “Nope. Seismosaurus. It’s bigger. Biggest of all.”

  “Man, you really know your stuff.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded.

  “Is your daddy in the house?”

  “I guess. Sleeping, I bet.”

  “I’ll go see. Say, how do you like the music?”

  He made a face.

  “You got that right,” I said.

  It was dim and gloomy inside the house and the noise was overpoweringly awful. A blonde in a seersucker skirt and jacket with blue-and-white spectator pumps was standing in the hallway. A gold-and-platinum Rolex sliding on her wrist like a bracelet. Brownish-red nails approximating the color of dried blood. Her hair was cut in a page boy that swirled around her face when she noticed me standing in the open doorway. She looked at me with sharp, distrustful eyes, and wasn’t overwhelmed. She had a Vuitton bag hung over one shoulder. She was speaking into empty space and her voice cut like a saber through the concrete wall of sound. She was shouting about the plans for the evening, names and places and hours. The recitation sounded like the day’s marching orders at Fort Zinderneuf. Sort of the march-or-die approach to social engagements. She concluded on a grace note.

  “And if you didn’t hear me over this shit and you fail to keep your appointed rounds, my dear little dickhead, you are dead meat.” She looked at me as if she had some suggestions for my social calendar that I probably wouldn’t much like, then stuck a ruthless smile on her pretty face. She reminded me of Doris Day in the old days. “And who the hell are you? No, on second thought, no. You’re not the vet and the only man on earth I want to see right now is the vet. I’ve got a Bouvier des Flandres who’s been upchucking into the swimming pool all morning. Not pretty, believe me. Do dogs get hair balls? No, I suppose not. You want Freddie, well, miraculously he is risen. In the music room.” She speared the air with one of the nails. A Masai warrior would have thought twice about going up against her. “I’ve always said Freddie needed a damn good thrashing.” She showed her teeth. “And now he’s got one.” She brushed past me on a cloud of Giorgio and I went into the room she’d pointed out.

  The biggest, rattiest speakers I’d ever seen were standing in the corners of a room that half-shook with the noise. You could feel the sound coming from the floor, like snakes up your pant leg. A man with a bald head sat in what looked to me like the Barcalounger my grandfather had acquired in his sunset years. He wore a faded blue terry-cloth robe and watched me through a cloud of cigarette smoke. His mouth moved but I couldn’t hear a word. I shrugged. A cheap turntable played an unlabeled disc. A forty-five. His mouth moved some more and I shrugged some more. His mouth went on and on and I saw he was swearing. It was like watching the manager run out onto the field to engage the umpire in dialogue. He reached over, flipped a switch, and the sudden silence made my ears sting.

  “I suppose,” he said, still shouting, “you’re the guy Bechtol called me about.”

  “I’m not some guy, birdbrain. I’m Lee Tripper. You send me very large royalty checks. I could take JC and go to another label anytime I choose. Guy. Jesus.” I looked at the stereo equipment. “Nice rig you got here.”

  “Basic rule. You gotta listen to shit if you’re gonna play shit. The worse the rig, the better it sounds. Mick the J taught me that. You must know that, your background.”

  “I’ve heard the theory. And I didn’t mean to bust in on you here—you could have taken me for a narc and blown me away.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I just got up, got my cup of Yuban Instant, I’m not thinking clearly. You giving me shit or what?”

  “You’re a sleaze farm and I’ve known you thirty seconds and already I feel like I’m up to my heinie in manure. I met your son in the back of that little Mercedes out front. He was guarding your cocaine for you. Very classy touch. If I were half a man I’d rip your head off and stuff it down the hole.”

  “Jeez, man, you get outta bed on the wrong side, or what?” He stood up and slipped out of the robe. He was about a size forty-eight, portly, deeply tanned, and looked oily. There were gold chains and medallions around his thick neck. He was about fifteen years out of date, but this was the record business, this was LA. Maybe he looked exactly right but it was hard to believe. Maybe time had stood still for Freddie Rosen. “We’re off to a bad start, my man. Let’s just chill out a minute here. Damned good thrashing always puts me in a lousy mood.”

  “Leave your sex life out of this.”

  He picked up a hand-painted shirt and slipped it on. I just knew it would be too tight. Somewhere there was a Too Tight Shop and all the Freddie Rosens were steadies. He buttoned the shirt and he looked like he’d just won the Wet T-Shirt Contest the first night of his Club Med vacation. He stuck out a hand with four rings on it, all set with diamonds that looked like zircons on him. This guy was head of MagnaDisc. I shook his hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

  “Come on, it’s time for Freddie Deuce’s computer class.” He led the way back outside. Late afternoon shadows were lengthening. “Then I’ll buy you breakfast. We gonna get along just fahn.” He leaned into the back of his Mercedes where his son was playing with little plastic dinosaurs. “Hey, De
uce, you want to play with the computers?”

  “You gotta be kidding,” the little boy said. “Sure.”

  “Gimme five, man,” Rosen said, slapping palms with his son. “And gimme that Baggie. Nasty stuff. Bad.” His son handed him the Baggie. We got into the elegant little car and set off down the driveway, through the gate where the animals still gamboled, and down the hill.

  “My car’s back there,” I said. “Can you find your way back?”

  “Do it every day.”

  “It’s the breadcrumbs,” his son said from the backseat and broke into maniacal laughter.

  “So what about a damned good thrashing?”

  “No, thanks, never indulge.”

  He laughed, stroked his bandido mustache. “That’s the name of the new band. We’re about to blanket the earth with ’em. A Damned Good Thrashing. ADGT. That’s their name. A return to pure Heavy Metal. Gonna be a monster. Hey, Deuce? Here, take the Baggie.” He handed the bag of cocaine back to his son. “It’s bad. You got that? Coke is bad. Okay, now open the bag and dump it over the side.”

  I watched the grinning kid as the wind took the white powder and blew it away down the street.

  “Showing off for me?” I asked.

  He laughed again. “I could care less what you think. Gotta set the Deuce here an example.” He sighed. “The joys of fatherhood. I gotta kick it, man. Always said I could if I wanted to. The Deuce makes me want to. Freddie Rosen the Second. Now we’ll see if I was right.” He pulled over to the curb beside a grammar school. His son was already out of the car, impatient to get at the computers. Freddie Rosen said he’d be back in a minute. I watched them walk across the grass and through the front door. By then the little boy was already talking to another kid and Freddie Rosen was chatting with a woman who’d brought her daughter.

  When he came back he said, “Breakfast time.” It was five o’clock, but apparently it was morning for Freddie Rosen. We drove forever and found a place called Nate and Al’s in Beverly Hills. It turned out to be a big New York deli. He led the way to a booth far from the door. I ordered a toasted bagel and coffee. He had a lox-and-onion omelet, potatoes, bagels, a knish on the side, an order of cole slaw. He looked at me. “I gotta go on a diet. I’m a mess, man. I need an image transplant. I need a really good rug. I need a really first-rate trainer, guy comes to the house, sculpts my body into a thing of beauty, into the temple it’s meant to be … What have I got now? Body by fuckin’ Sara Lee. What can I say?” He shoveled in about two hundred calories, one forkload, and looked miserable.